Thanks to the people who took time to fill me in on what blinkx is doing that is wrong.
This has caused me to think a lot about licensing issues again. To me its never cut and dry, and the intellectual rights laws are not setup to protect us automatically, tragically we cannot sit back and expect everyone to honour our rights. I keep reading the full legal version of the various creative commons licenses, and other stuff on the cc website, and I cannot help that thinking that is we want protection and to actually gain the benefits of the cc licensing system, content creators need to be more proactive. We must follow the letter of the license ourselves, and take steps to raise awareness of these issues with commercial violators that come along. People vary as to how much they care about this stuff. If you care a lot about your rights being protected, I ask you to consider the following: 1) How prominently is your cc license displayed? Is it present only on your website, or also in your RSS feed, embedded metadata or as video within the video? Rocketboom does not even show the cc details on the same page as the video content, something I mentioned previously. We know how automated things have gotten due to syndication etc. Theres a creative commons module for RSS, we need to use this stuff and then show violators how they can clean up their act by harnessing this technology. 2) Does your own content invalidate the license? If you use content within your video that you know you dont have the rights to, your cc license is invalid. 3) Attribution. The creative commons license says that attribution should be done in the manner that the original author of the works requests. Yet I see nobody who has ever stated how attribution should be performed. Does klinking to your original RSS feed count? Thers massive variety in how this issue is tackled, for example when videobloggers use eachothers stuff, theres variation in how much attribution they give eachother. 4) Hypocracy and double-standards. Moral ground is lost if videoblogggers have a lax attitude towards checking the rights on material they use. o we even look at eachothers licnses? eg I just looked at Ryanne's and it says NO DERIVATIVES! How does that fit made to match the remix-culture attitudes that feature in this community? Did everyone who ever remixed Ryanne ask permission first? Now I get the feeling that its the NON-COMMERCIAL element of most CC licenses that people here are most interested in. Attribution and derivative issues only seem to get talked about here when a violator is also considered commercial. Well thats not what these licenses are saying, they arent saying 'oh do whatever you like as long as you arent commercial', everyone is supposed to adhere to all of the rights granted in the license. OK, I know, its easier to just invoke two little words, 'fair use', and overstretch this to act as a defense of the individual. Simplify things down to the favoured 'good and evil' way of seeing things/making decisions, the individual can do no wrong and doesnt need to bother reading licenses, the commercial must follow things to the letter. A nice simple attractive way to not have to put any more energy into thinking about the issue, but bogus and flawed if you ask me. Dont get me wrong, in the case of Blinkx its fairly sure they are breaking peoples cc licenses, their use of the material should be considered commercial (though id only be 100% certain of that if you had to pay to watch content, or their were adverts in the video). The attribution issue is greyer cos they do provide links to original authors RSS feed, which is better than nothing. They certainly break the cc license by not displaying a copy of the license with the redistributed work, but as I said earlier I feel some work is needed by videobloggers to make their CC license terms syndicate along with the content. Then we get back to what to do about violators? I suggest that maybe if theres a few of us who are interested in this stuff, we could join together and use collective power to try to enforce some of this stuff. However rather amusingly, taken to its most efecive conclusion this sort of thing would see us acting sort of like the RIAA, which leads us back to the obvious double-standards people have regarding rights issues. Steve of Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Verdi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Here's what's total bullshit about blinx to me (besides the > implication of agreements with people they have no agreements with): > > They are a commercial entity and they are republishing my content > without permission and without attribution in violation of the > license on my work. > > Seems pretty cut and dry to me. > -- > Verdi > <URL: http://michaelverdi.com/ > > <URL: http://freevlog.org/ > > <URL: http://node101.org/ > > ------------------------ Yahoo! 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